


Bloom & Wilt

by zopponde



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Amnesia, Angst and Tragedy, Episode: s13e19 The End is Near, Gen, RvB Angst War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-19
Updated: 2018-03-19
Packaged: 2019-04-04 11:17:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 920
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14019117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zopponde/pseuds/zopponde
Summary: Prompt: "Felix isn’t dead... for a reason. Go batshit crazy w/ this one"He thinks they're daffodils, but he's never been big on flowers. He's not completely sure his name is Gates, either.





	Bloom & Wilt

Gates wakes up in a suit of armor in a field of daffodils. He thinks they’re daffodils, anyway, white cups on yellow saucers of petals, long stems and long thin leaves swaying like grass in the wind, but he’s never been big on flowers. And he’s not completely sure his name is Gates, either.

There’s a floating pillar above him, a mountain-sized monument to alien invention. It isn’t familiar from training on alien technology, but Gates is damn sure it isn’t human, and it’s damn impressive. All the aliens known to man currently are hellbent on the extinction of humanity, so Gates is pretty sure that the serene field of flowers is just a diversion from how utterly fucked he is.

The armor is stifling, unfamiliar, excessive for some PFC straight out of basic. He wants to take it off, but he remembers someone red-faced yelling at him to never let down his guard, always be ready for an attack from anywhere, never turn down a tactical advantage or he’s dead.

But Gates desperately wants to feel the wind on his scalp, something to assure him that he’s alive. He tells himself he might get in trouble for wearing armor he doesn’t remember being issued, and he pops the helmet off.

His hair is longer than he remembers. The wind tries to blow it across his forehead, but it’s been flattened by the helmet and stiffened by bad hygiene. Gates runs his fingers through it, trying to register the resistance of it through the armor gloves. Less than an inch in the back, just short enough in the front to stay out of his eyes, chopped unevenly all over.

So he’s been out of basic long enough to grow his hair, and out of civilization long enough to cut it himself. This should be worrying, but the breeze is pleasant, a welcome reprieve from the smell of recycled sweat and insulated breath. And so what if he doesn’t remember anything? On a field like this, he’ll have a moment to put his helmet back on if he sees one or two aliens, and if it’s a whole platoon then he’s fucked anyway. The best he can hope for is to die here in the sun, wind pulling heat from his face, daffodils tickling the back of his neck.

Gates takes a look at the helmet in his hands: gray, orange stripe, dark visor, pointed front. Not exactly standard issue. How did he get it? Was it stolen, bought, earned?

How much of his life is gone from his memory?

... He should try to find his squad. They might have answers, and if he’s beyond standard-issue then he might have joined some spec ops team that can actually fight back, or at least get off this rock before it gets vaporized.

Gates pushes himself to his feet and carries his helmet under his arm. He wanders the field aimlessly for ten minutes before he finds a magazine of rifle ammo, and twenty minutes later he finds the half-loaded rifle. He reloads it automatically, not recognizing the model but knowing from muscle memory how to reload it. He assumes that he fell, maybe his dropship taking a hot landing, and that he got separated on the way down from his weapon and his memory. It’s his best guess so far.

There’s some other device that he finds near the rifle. It’s alien-looking, so Felix has no idea how to work it or if he wants to. It’s probably a trap and likely to explode. He leaves it, absently registering how weird it is to find that lying around in an empty field.

Gates wanders for less than an hour with the rifle before he approaches the edge of the field, and that’s when he finally sees another living soul: three human soldiers in power armor. One in tan and red, one in tan and teal, one in white and blue. The white one has a bullshit vertical visor and some weird protrusions on the helmet, and Gates hopes he doesn’t have to work regularly with someone who chooses such stupid equipment.

“Hey!” Gates calls, waving with the hand holding his helmet. The three soldiers look at him. “You guys know what’s going on? Are we fighting or what?”

Gates sees three rifles point at him. He manages to wonder if he’s forgotten an end to the Great War or the start of one between humans. He manages to drop his helmet, bring his rifle into both hands, and point it in the general direction of these new people. But now it’s combat, and everything happens so quickly.

A lucky shot hits an unarmored joint in Gates’ arm. Without the helmet, there is no energy shield to keep the round from tearing through the undersuit. All of Gates is focused on the bullet wound, like his body is trying to fill the hole ripped into the muscle with his liquefied consciousness. There’s just enough of him left in his ears to hear someone scream, “For Rogers!”

Gates did not join the UNSC planning to kill humans, but it suddenly becomes completely apparent to him that he would. He recognizes a cry for revenge and thinks he has survived them before. Anger flares in him and he is determined to survive this one, to kill these three people and survive more.

The thought is born in his brain instantaneously but it escapes through a bullet hole. There is nothing to pack the wound with.

**Author's Note:**

> Failed Step 1  
> (I promise I tried a different take but it was going to be too long to be feasible right now. Maybe I'll revisit it someday?)
> 
> If you like it, consider sharing it!  
> <http://seerofbread.tumblr.com/post/172018569305/bloom-wilt>  
> <https://www.pillowfort.io/posts/195368>


End file.
